I’m an experimental process kind of writer. Different approaches for different projects. I think the process should be an expression of the product, and vice versa. These days, I’m choosing to not write fiction for a while. I’m choosing inaction — thinking outside of written language — which is equally important to writing.

What is your go-to activity when procrastinating on writing?

For me, procrastination and distraction are tools that encourage a more diverse life. When I don’t want to write, I make art, music, take a walk, conduct an interview, cook, eat, have sex, edit, dance, socialize, stare at the wall, watch something, or read something, and all of these activities are enjoyable and worthwhile to me.

How do you decide when to be done with a written work?

For me, nothing is ever really done — done is dead — but, at some point, if it’s to be published, I just stop working on it.

Name a writer who is a deep influence on you who you suspect hardly anyone you know has read.

Here’s the thing: black life matters. And because black life has always mattered, Charles Burnett made Killer of Sheep(1977). His first film brings audiences into the world of black people – not just merely depicting it. It is crucial, because it came at a time where blacks, coming out of the 1960s, were attempting to make their way up the social and economic ladder.

Killer of Sheep was timely, due to the fact that in the ’70s, the black depiction on screen was dominated by Blaxploitation cinema, which after the release of Melvin van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song and others like Bill Gunn’s Ganja and Hess, portrayed blacks in negative, stereotypical roles that often did nothing to advance the goals of black Americans. It is timeless, because it can serve as a blueprint for any filmmaker to combat those same stereotypical, one-dimensional depictions, as well as help black and other directors contemplate a new way of making film.

In a 2010 interview in Filmmaker Magazine, Burnett said, “I was only trying to be objective – that was my conflict. Not imposing. I wanted to do something that reflected the way people in the community would see themselves. Coming from another place, you can see a much larger picture. But when you’re in a well, you can only see the narrow light above. If you’ve been living like that for a long time, it can have an unproductive effect on you in many ways. So it wasn’t my personal conflicts. It was the conflict of the community.”

Stan (Henry Sanders) and his wife (Kaycee Moore) in the film KILLER OF SHEEP, a Milestone Film & Video release.

Killer of Sheep centers on Stan (Henry G. Saunders) a slaughterhouse worker, and his family, living in Watts, CA. We first meet Stan on his knees framed in low-angle shot, with someone towering over him. From here on, in this sequence, friends, neighbors, and his wife constantly invade his space. Stan’s daughter stands at the kitchen’s entrance, wearing a dog mask, nearly forgotten. She is the only person not bothering him, and not framed above him but at eye level. Burnett employed the techniques of Italian neorealism: loose shooting, long takes, casting of amateur actors, theme, and editing and coupled those filmic techniques with black concerns – for example the necessity of maturing faster, depicted in the opening scene, where a little boy is chastised by his father for showing a lack of initiative in a situation, or prejudice of skin tone by white store owners looking to hire out blacks, and cultural (items) such as hymns, blues music, classical music by black composers like William Grant Still, introduced through soundtrack – and ways of passing time such as dominoes, playing “the dozens” – and the keeping of the black vernacular.

Burnett was cautious, and understanding of the Italian neorealist form. He appreciated it. The point he is trying to make, that like the Italians of the ’50s, blacks often have a uniqueness that stems from the fact that they’re systematically oppressed. Burnett is also submitting, to black people, there is no black superhero in a pink suit and fur, selling drugs, messing with white women, attached to romantic ideals about progression that fit right into the power structure, that’s going to save you. As he discussed in a 2007 interview with Filmmaker Magazine:

“…And then you take a movie like Hustle and Flow where they’re saying, ‘It’s hard out here for a pimp.’ That’s the biggest slap in the face! I argue with people who say the main character wants to make it, he’s working hard, and you can’t knock him for that. You can’t? He pimped his girlfriend! He could’ve gotten a job at McDonald’s. And he’s supposed to be a hero? The ends justify the means? That logic justifies selling drugs, doing almost anything. And that’s what gets promoted? That’s the last thing we need in the community. Why not make something that would uplift? It doesn’t necessarily have to be overly positive, but [it should at least be] realistic and not trying to denigrate….”

It’s important to emphasize the America part since Killer of Sheep is just as much about a city and its economics as it is about race. Throughout the film, shots of children playing in various areas around South Central LA are interspersed with scenes of Stan, his family, and Stan at work. Burnett used decisive, elongated shots, soundtrack, and rhythmic pacing, to symbolize the aggravating, slow movement up the economic ladder. His filmmaking choices also worked to intensify the lethargy brought on by depression, and being poor. And because the kids are poor and black in America, because industries stand taller – shown brilliantly by Burnett’s framing of buildings and Stan’s work – Killer’s main obstacle is to show what these decedents of slaves value what most do: time and space.

In a scene where kids sit on a high wall, resting from playing, the song “The House I Live In” by Paul Robeson, a song Robeson wrote about his perspective on America, begins. The kids sit on top of the wall staring out into a dismal area where apartment complexes used to be. They’ve been playing with pieces of wood, building a platform, riding bikes, and playing with toys. They make something out of their situation. In a way, they are satisfied, but not. They want more but they can’t get more. Similarly, in a later scene, when Stan goes with a friend to get a motor for car so he won’t appear broke, he and a friend, Eugene, end up breaking the motor by letting it slip off the back of a truck. Stan had wanted to move it further into the bed but Eugene, tired from hauling it down a flight of stairs, is through with it. Eugene articulates their plight perfectly: “All that work for nothing.”

It is something we all question as Americans: what am I really doing this for? For oppressed people, it’s worse. In a scene where Stan dances slowly with his wife to Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth,” semi-enclosed in darkness except for a window, Stan attempts to show affection to his wife (Kacey Moore) who has been fuming with desire. When Stan dances with her, she tries to caress him, tries to entice him by kissing him, rubbing him, and bringing him closer. Stan does not react, solid as steel. They go on and she keeps on. She keeps trying infiltrate; to wake him up. He doesn’t go for it and walks away. She walks to the window, stretches out on it, and begins to cry. Her body language, the deep darkness, the shot, the music, says it all: what are we supposed to be doing in here? Stan leaves her in darkness – in her space. It’s where we see her come out of the film most of the time. The places where Stan must help free her from. But how can you do this when the world says you don’t matter? Buildings tower over you, and your people get killed in the streets by the police to prove it.

Gargoyle Magazine editor Richard Peabody said of Cromley’s new collection: “Giano Cromley’s powerful stories feature blue collar characters who make mistakes, race blindly toward disaster, and frequently plunge over the rim into darkness. These are the folks Tom Waits and Lucinda Williams capture in their songs. Survival in the aftermath is the key.”

Giano Cromley studied at Dartmouth College and the University of Montana MFA program. He lives in Chicago.

In what way do you think literature has the ability to change the way people live their lives?

I teach literature at a community college on the south side of Chicago, so I’m lucky enough to see literature change people’s lives every day. I think the way it can most significantly impact people is through the way it forces us to flex our empathy muscles. Life in the age of the smart phone doesn’t often require us to really share much with other people. Yet in my literature classes, I’m able to get my students to think about what life was like for nineteenth century Russians, early twentieth century southerners, and a Native American shortly after 9/11 — all in the span of a single semester. I get to see how they change as the semester goes along, how they’ll hold their judgments longer, consider viewpoints that differ from their own, and even change their minds after a spirited classroom discussion. Everyone should be forced to take more literature courses. The world would be a better place.

What is the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

In my experience advice comes in two basic varieties. The first one is totally practical, just plug it in and start using it. The other type is more theoretical; you have to really think about it before you can apply it. So I’ll give the best piece of writing advice I’ve gotten from both schools of thought.

Practical first: Never have your characters answer each other’s questions in dialogue. Reading people answering questions is boring and unrevealing. Far more interesting is to have people respond to questions in oblique or surprising ways that wind up telling the reader a lot more about the characters than a straight answer would have.

Here’s an example. A character asks: “What time is it?”

The straightforward answer: “Twelve thirty.” Which doesn’t reveal much about anything.

Instead, why not play that conversation something like this:

“What time is it?”

“I haven’t slept in eighteen hours.”

This doesn’t answer the question, but the speaker inadvertently revealed a lot more about herself than she would have otherwise. Good fiction doesn’t mirror real life; it amplifies it.

Okay, now the theoretical advice: You have to be willing to walk right up to the line that divides emotion and melodrama. It’s a risk, because if you cross it, you’ve strayed into saccharine territory and you’ve likely lost the reader. But if you never get close to that line you’ll never have characters that people really care about.

Which author do you re-read most frequently?

I reread Richard Ford at least once a year. I’ll usually stick with something from his Bascombe series, though anything of his is worth picking up for me. The great thing about Richard Ford’s writing is that he doesn’t pull any tricks. There are no verbal pyrotechnics, no flowery sentences that drag on forever. Yet every page has something where you shake your head and ask, How the hell did he do that? It’s like a literary battery charge for me. The rhythms of his sentences just tend to fill me back up and make it seem possible to get back to writing my own words and sentences.

Describe your writing routine.

I’d love to say I can write any time and anywhere, but my routine is laborious and intensive, bordering on byzantine. This stems from a natural tendency to procrastinate — the lengthier the ritual I have to go through the more I can delay having to actually create something. I like to have a good chunk of time set aside — at least two to three hours. I’ll usually light some incense or a candle. I’ll fill up my fountain pen (I write all my first drafts long-hand) and carefully select my music for the day. I also have a special desk in my office that’s too small for a computer to fit on so I have as few distractions as possible once I’m finally sitting down to do battle with the empty page.

What is your go-to activity when procrastinating on writing?

House cleaning, cooking, dog-walking. Over the past year and a half I’ve been rehabbing a hundred-year-old house on the South Side of Chicago, so that’s provided many, many hours of procrastination. I’m very creative when it comes to putting off what I know I should be doing.

How do you decide when to be done with a written work?

I’m not sure a piece of writing is ever really done. While editing this collection of short stories, some of which I wrote years ago and edited the stuffing out of and published in respectable journals, I found many, many lines that made me sit back and wonder what the hell I’d been thinking when I wrote them. I’m sure the first time I sit down and read this newly edited collection, I’ll find a lot of lines that make me squirm.

Do you ever listen to music when you write? If so, what’s on your playlist?

I always listen to music when I write. It has to be instrumental, though, since lyrics tend to jam me up when I’m trying to come up with my own words. Often I’ll go with classical, Mahler or Bach or Liszt. When I know I’m close to finishing a big draft, I’ll put on Beethoven’s Ninth because everyone should have a triumphant-ending soundtrack they like to hear when they’re finishing something important. Over the last couple years, I’ve drifted to more modern instrumental music — something I think they call post-rock. Explosions in the Sky is great! I really like City of the Sun, Mattia Cupelli and Max Richter. One band I kept listening to over and over while working on this collection was band called This Will Destroy You, which I found to be a perfect match for these stories.

Best bookstore you’ve ever been to?

Any bookstore that has my books on its shelves. Because my books have come out on an indie press, I don’t often get to see my books just randomly stocked on shelves, so this it’s a pretty selective group of bookstores. I know this answer probably makes me seem like a narcissistic asshole, but any writer who tells you otherwise is lying.

If you were standing in line at a bookstore and noticed the person in front of you was holding your latest book, what would you say to them?

Pssst… that writer there, I heard he rescues stray dogs and helps old ladies across the street all the time.

What job have you held that was most helpful for your writing?

I worked for several years in Washington DC as a deputy press secretary for a senator from Montana. On any given day, I could find myself writing about agriculture policy, health policy, or environmental reform. I had to support positions I didn’t personally hold. And I had to do it quickly, communicating complex ideas in a way that the average person could understand. Every day was like a crash course in how to be a better writer. I also had to learn a lot of keyboarding tricks to help speed up the drafting process. Those tricks have helped save me months of my life over the years as I’ve edited my own writing.

What is one of your vices?

I used to chew tobacco when I wrote. I did it for several years out of college. It helped me focus on what I was writing. Probably a lot like Ritalin for someone who suffers from ADHD. When I finally stopped several years ago, I was a little bit at sea. I seriously wondered if I’d ever be able to write again. But over time I realized it was a crutch, and the argument could be made that my writing has gotten better since I quit. Sometimes I’ll chew a toothpick just to have something to do with myself.

What is one of your prejudices?

I’m inherently biased against long books. More than 400 pages and it better be a really good goddamn book. I know this is a terrible bias, especially since many of my favorite books are longer than 400 pages. Still, at this point in my life, asking me to get through something that long seems like a real imposition.

Favorite books you’ve read in the past year?

I have to say my editor’s newest book, Island of Clouds, is really, really good. Jerry Brennan’s writing is like a Philip Glass symphony in that it starts with a simple motif that gets repeated and slowly added onto and it ripples outward, until you reach a point where each little change to the original motif takes on huge importance, with profound implications on the piece as a whole. I heartily recommend it.

I’m looking to meet someone, but I work at a donut shop. Healthy Donut, to be exact. Where the donuts are baked, not fried.

I do not care about or understand Healthy Donut and the concept behind it. I help myself to free food and there is little to no sun exposure and heavy lifting. That’s why I’m here.

Rebecca, she’s the only semi-eligible option because she doesn’t care about healthy donuts either. Seems like the only thing she really does care about is cricket, the game.

She stays up all night long waiting for the games to start in Pakistan or India, and these games, they’ll go for years. I’m fucking serious.

And then since they’re still on when she leaves for work, she brings earbuds to work and sneaks them underneath her Healthy Donut Drive-Thru headset, which kind of pisses me off because no way Manager lets me do that.

“Yo Rebecca, what you listening to?” I say.

“Cricket!” she says, huge smile.

I pull on the little wire running up to her ear, pop the earbud under my own Healthy Donut Drive-Thru headset, and all I hear are words I don’t understand rattling off real fast.

“Yo Rebecca,” I say. “You understand this stuff?”

“Not when it’s in Punjabi,” she says. “But it makes me feel like I’m somewhere else.”

I want to be somewhere else too, so I leave.

***

Manager calls me before I get home; phone is buzzing in the pocket of my dirty donut pants.

There’s flour stuck in between all the buttons. Fat chance I’m getting reimbursed for that.

“Matthew!” he yells. “Did you go home?”

“No,” I say.

“Where did you go?”

“I am currently on the street which leads to the place you could call my home, though my true home, I feel, I haven’t found yet because a home is more of a feeling than a place.”

“Matthew,” he yells. “Get back here!”

I go back.

There is a Healthy Donut lineup when I get back; Manager needs me to work the counter as a result. I save my own backside by being incredibly efficient and friendly in taking the orders.

Only one person flips me the bird, maybe two. Not bad for my first time.

***

Rebecca invites me to watch cricket, clearly thinking I was interested due to my touching her headphones.

I was not interested.

But I don’t say I’m not interested. I say yes. She smiles and turns red and goes to the back, leaving me alone on the Healthy Donut Sandwich Line, which would normally make me really pissed, but for some reason I’m not pissed; I’ve got this little bubble in my stomach that makes me feel warm.

I may simply need to shit.

The Healthy Donut Sandwich Counter keeps ticking above my head. I am now on Healthy Donut Sandwich 17841, but the counter is spinning faster than I can keep up and is way ahead of me.

I take a deep breath and ask myself again, how the fuck is a donut sandwich even a thing?

I should know; I’ve heard Manager explain it a million times.

“It’s the fact that the dough is only slightly sweetened and the amount of yeast, proportionate to this low dose of sugar, allows for a perfectly delicious sweet spot [nudge nudge haha wink] between the traditional sugary donut and the favored yeast-based breads such as the bagel.”

The Customer is always charmed by this description. Manager is Manager for a reason.

This being the Healthy Donut Brand tag line. The logo is a donut wearing a little rasta hat with a joint his mouth because somehow, weed is a superfood now.

The rush is over, so Manager turns around and looks at us on the Healthy Donut Sandwich Line, makes sure we see him do his lean-back-squinty-eye-toke-a-joint thing.

I don’t laugh.

I understand Rebecca’s attachment to the headphones and the cricket commentators, yelling.

That’s much better than what’s happening to me.

***

Rebecca lives in the basement of an old house that feels damp inside. The match we’re watching, she tells me it’s been on for three weeks.

I say, “That’s impossible.”

She says, “It’s true.”

“Do they eat?”

“Of course, dummy,” she says. Her eyes stay stuck to the screen.

In the dark, from the side, with nothing but cricket splashing on her face, she’s really cute.

But there’s no way these guys’ve been playing for three weeks. Who lives like that? I imagine hate-filled shouting matches in large ritzy homes across the Indian subcontinent.

“You think because you make a few cricket dollars you can stand around on the pitch for three weeks straight?” the wife says, and kid starts crying and clinging to Mom’s leg.

Cricket Dad shakes his head and pours himself a stiff drink, no ice.

It doesn’t make any sense.

I look it up on my phone but Google doesn’t go anywhere because I’ve used up my data again.

“Rebecca, what’s your Wifi,” I say.

“No Wifi,” she says.

That’s fucked, I think, but also kind of rustic and contrarian. This girl is surprising me. A real one-drummer lone-wolf type of gal. It makes me pretty hard.

She doesn’t turn me down, but she doesn’t really look at me, either. The whole time, taking off her clothes and lying back on the couch, she’s watching the cricket game, remote in her hand.

With every noise I make she turns up the volume. The TV gets really loud.

I cum to the deafening sound of a smooth British voice explaining the travails a certain young Pakistani man had gone through to make it to the Cricket Big League. Moral of the story being, God-given talent will never be denied.

“Plus,” says the female announcer, “what a cutie.”

The Punjabi commentary would have been better.

Rebecca pulls her pants on and sits back in her nook of the couch, still watching.

There’s a really strong smell in the room that I didn’t notice before. People upstairs are yelling or laughing, I can’t tell. It’s all muffled coming through the ceiling.

I google cricket game when I get home. I get results for games involving crickets.

I try to think like a British person. I write crickey (backspace) cricket match length in Google.

It tells me the maximum length of a match is five days. Which is long, but it’s sure as shit shorter than three weeks. Come on.

That girl really is wacky, I think. Real nut bar, I think.

This is what I get, searching for love at Healthy Donut. This is what happens when you’re looking to meet someone. You go for the low-hanging fruit.

The betrayal is deep. I trusted her. We shared intimate moments together on her couch to the smell of salted cod and the sound of rich British people enjoying themselves.

I decide to confront her at work the next day, when she comes in for the lunch shift.

She arrives and I’m not ready, due to the healthy donut fad really catching on. I haven’t steeled my nerves. I leave the line and go to the bathroom and throw some water on my face, cold. I take deep breaths into the mirror.

Rebecca is at the lockers outside the bathroom when I open the door. The purple shirt with the yellow donut in the little red and green hat looks really good on her.

“You’re very on brand today,” I say. And I smile. I can’t believe I used the words On Brand.

She smiles her cutely crooked teeth and blushes again.

“Come watch tonight?” she says.

I don’t say anything about the true length of a cricket match or what this three weeks stuff was about.

She gives me a kiss on tip toes. She puts her ear buds in and I follow her to our positions on the Donut Sandwich Line, where the counter keeps going up.

Kevin Canty is the author of several books, including the story collections A Stranger in this World, Honeymoon, and Where the Money Went and the novels Into the Great Wide Open, Everything, Nine Below Zero, Winslow in Love, and most recently, The Underworld. He is the former Director of Creative Writing at the University of Montana.

The Underworld (W.W. Norton, March 2017) was inspired by a fire that killed 82 miners in a small Idaho silver mining town in 1972. The San Francisco Chronicle wrote, “Like much of Canty’s fiction, it’s an honest portrait of two lost souls trying to make sense of the hand they’ve been dealt, the choices they’ve made and have yet to make…If you haven’t spent an evening or two in the grand company of Kevin Canty’s work, now’s your time to start.”

What is the best writing advice you’ve ever received?

Several years ago, in graduate school, I was hanging around in Padgett Powell’s kitchen, grousing about the fact that I couldn’t seem to get anything published. All I want is just one decent publication, I told him, so I can feel like a real writer. Well, then you should be writing better stories, he said. Still the best piece of writing advice ever, though not the easiest to follow.

Which author do you re-read most frequently?

Weirdly enough, it may be Anthony Trollope. I read him sometimes when I’m working on a novel. He has such a sure sense of the form of the novel, of the way it leads from scene to scene, the way the threads of plot and ideas converge and separate. And the writing is just bad enough so I’m not tempted to copy it.

Describe your writing routine.

Wake up, coffee, NY Times online and then to work within an hour of the time I wake up. I do check my email in the morning but I don’t engage with or reply to anything. No schoolwork (I teach) until the day’s work is done. I used to have word-count goals but lately it’s just a sense that I’ve gotten something of substance done. Then the world crashes in around noon.

What is your go-to activity when procrastinating on writing?

I play a lot of guitar. A lot. I don’t let myself touch a guitar until I’m done writing for the day (see above). It occurs to me that I have a lot of rules and superstitions around the writing process but maybe this is my only bulwark against sloth and chaos. At any rate, my favorite recreation during baseball season is to watch the Nationals and play my Telecaster. Playing bad guitar solos is satisfying in a way that writing bad short stories is not.

Do you ever listen to music when you write? If so, what’s on your playlist?

Dead silence, all the time. See “rules and superstitions,” above.

Best bookstore you’ve ever been to?

Powell’s, Portland, hands down. I lived in Portland all through the ‘80s when Powell’s was just a big drafty unheated barn of a place full of very cheap books. I bought the whole Paris Review interview series and most of the original Vintage Contemporaries line for a dollar a pop. The place was run by disconsolate ex-Reedies who looked like they were too cold to feel their fingers, though maybe they were just on drugs. No coffee shop, no shelf talkers, no customer service — but my brother-in-law was able to find a shop manual for a 1967 Fiat Abarth for two dollars. Loved that place.

Do you own an e-reader?

Yep. Good for travel and camping, though I read regular books around the house. I do not have a moral stand for or against.

Is Facebook good for you?

No.

What about Amazon?

More complicated.

What job have you held that was most helpful for your writing?

In 1973 I spent the summer working for the Milwaukee Railroad in Avery, Idaho. I lived in the cars — converted passenger rail cars, parked on a siding — and spent my days with a spike maul, the nine-pound hammer of folk song fame. It was hard, dirty work and the people I worked with were hard, dirty men. The money was good and the scene was pretty different.

All this rested and marinated in my mind until a couple of years ago, when I decided that I might know enough to write about a mine disaster in Idaho that happened around that time. I didn’t know anybody who was directly involved but all the men I worked with in Avery knew somebody who knew somebody. They had amazing wild stories about the aftermath.

There’s really no substitute for a little direct knowledge when you’re writing about anything. My time on the railroad is nowhere depicted in the book but it’s reflected in every line of dialog, every description of place. God knows I wasn’t in it for the research — I needed the money, and it felt like an adventure — but several decades later, the experience came in handy.

What is one of your vices?

Easier to talk about the ones I don’t have. I don’t gamble, at least not much, and certainly not seriously. The rest of them, I have pretty well covered.

I was going to say that I indiscriminately love all of them but that isn’t true. There are words I don’t love — long ones, generally, and abstractions. But I do love the ones I love: axe, tree, run, fuck.

I’ve decided to relaunch Tourist Information, my Identity Theory blog-column from the early 2000s, with the plan of writing a new post each Thursday. (Though in true Identity Theory fashion it will most likely end up being random.)

I’ve already written and thought so much this week about the mass shooting that took place down the street from me in Vegas that I’m burnt out. So for my first post of the new Tourist Information era, I am reposting what I wrote on Facebook about my experience of the incident:

It’s hard to describe what it feels like to turn onto a road after leaving your neighborhood and tell yourself, “You can’t go that way, hundreds of people were just gunned down there.”

It’s a battle between nausea and tears, nausea and tears, nausea and tears, over and over again.

I try not to think about specifics of the violence. I think about what I can do to help, but what little I can do feels helpless.

I want a time machine.

I want to tell the front-desk agent at Mandalay Bay, “An old man is going to request a high floor with a view. Don’t give it to him. For the rest of your life, you will never stop thinking about putting him in that room.”

I want to tell those tourists at the concert, “Stay home. Vegas isn’t that great. Be with your families. You never know when you’ll see them again.”

And then I get really, really sad for them.

I don’t want to see football highlights on TV news. I don’t want to hear political opinions about gun violence. They feel hollow, useless, and detached.

I wonder about the sickness in this man’s head, what would lead to premeditate an attack like this. The plotting. The acquisition of machine guns. The belief that shooting hundreds of people would lead to pleasure, solve his problems. One man’s sick desire can lead to countless people’s gruesome suffering.

I’ve spent a thousand nights on the strip with the trust that no monster would come along and exploit the vulnerability of the crowds. Despite having been close to a half dozen minor shootings, I insisted on believing we were protected from an outright massacre.

I was wrong.

I can’t imagine what the families of these victims are going through, what life will be like for those survivors who did not have the luxury of distance from the bullets.

I want us all to go back in time, back before any of this could ever have been possible, and make the necessary changes to the world that seem, now, too late to make. I don’t have a lot of hope. But there has to be hope, right? There just has to be.

The ‘Left’ in Britain has been shifting in shape. The old guard remain—the unions, the various Trotskyist factions, the Labour party—but are being shaken up and sometimes displaced by a new generation with a new set of tactics. The move towards direct democracy, consensus, and intersectionality is buoyed by a militancy and an energy that crystallises in direct action. Climate Camp, UK Uncut and Occupy pushed for protests that went beyond marches and rallies, showing how a few people putting their bodies on the line could disrupt the flow of capital and disturb the peace in the name of justice. Groups like Sisters Uncut, Black Lives Matter UK, and End Deportations are borrowing tactics from white anarchist movements, but are led by young people of colour, impatient with the state, the media, and the established ways of ‘doing’ dissent.

From the outside—the interviews, the headlines, the breathless snowballing energy of social media—these actions look bold and powerful, the work of militants, uncompromising, even dogmatic, in their commitment. But behind the scenes, direct action is as fraught with fear and uncertainty as any other act. In this essay, Sita Balani explores what it might feel like to stop the traffic.

1. Be careful but go hard.

“Be careful,” D said, walking me to the door, her eyes fixed and serious. Then a smile, a flash of mischief, a kiss. She rephrased: “Be careful but go hard.”

By the next day, on the interminable tube journey, I had lost the thread of her advice, and felt my stomach lurch at the slow descent into the tunnels, the tangle of bus stops at the unfamiliar station, the nervy walk to the meeting point, eyes scanning for fellow travellers. This was a bad idea, a bad idea, a bad idea, a bad idea, a bad idea…

2. Who the fuck would have a dog that big in a flat this small?

The conversation stilted and all eyes following this animal, a sleek wolfish beast, with a puppy’s temperament, a testament to the weird whims of human dominance. Who the fuck would have a dog that big in a flat this small? Waiting for the unknown others to arrive but my mind on only my phone, screen as blank as a closed eye, stashed in the other room, off for the foreseeable. Unless I do the unthinkable and leave.

3. This is where we make the plan

Sitting in a circle in the park, I can feel one tension replace another, pure dread ebbs and into the gap flows a silty stream of anticipation. Strangers become less strange as they confess their nerves, their fears. The anxiety loosens into nervous laughter and from the laughter we re-settle into ourselves, get down to business.

A softly spoken woman with sinewy arms takes us through how the lock ons work. We test out the metal tubes, practice clicking our wrists into them so we can stay chained to each other, pinned to the tarmac. We talk about the layout of the road, the timings and routes. She reminds us that this is where we make the plan. Everything up till now is speculation, potential, a scaffold but not a building. We can change the game still. But the scaffold is built and looks sturdy to me, and to the group that is becoming a group. We tinker and twist till the pieces fit, till we can picture the building. We work together tentatively but it works.

It’s getting cold, it’s time to go. Everyone glows with power and determination in the late August sunset: the oldest of us tinged with teenage defiance, the youngest with an untapped wisdom.

We hit our stride and talk politics on the walk back, the common thread thickening through shared intent. But I’m still wary. These new bonds are fragile, they are all context, and my suspicion stays intact. Not just the obvious concern—that there’s a cop, that there’s a snitch—but that we are wrong, they are wrong, I am wrong. That I am one of them, that I am not one of them. That the world is the world is the world. That we are children being naughty. That our conviction is a tissue of lies that will be blown away by the wind. That we are fantasists and fear mongers and fanatics seeing doom and plot when there is only inevitable suffering.

The latecomers trickle in and my heart lifts through my throat into a squeal—you! It’s G, a friend whose voice I hear on the daily, who sends photos of shoes she’s thinking of buying, who knows my fam, who is my fam. We marvel at the surprise—not of each other’s presence but of our silence. Everyone applauds our adherence to the security protocol and I feel newly certain, newly secure.

5. The mothers walk into the room.

The hours pass as the final stragglers come through, and the plan is restated, refined, reimagined with new clarity, those of us who saw that bare scaffold feeling more confident as we retread the bars a second, third, fourth time.

It’s getting late and it’s an early start. The mood oscillates from sleepover to new territory, depths unexplored but deliciously familiar, like a swimming pool in a dream.

A final go around, the circle re-forms and into it we pool our stories, our strengths, our gratitude. We say who brought us here, whose lives inspired us and I feel (no, I see) the mothers walk into the room, one by one, invoked by those who say their names and those who don’t. In the exhaustion and expectation, a new intimacy is born. I think: my mother would place her head in her tired hands and sigh like she was a thousand years old if she knew I was here. But still—cruel irony! sorry ma! —she walks in with the rest.

I don’t sleep and then we are on the bus, barely breathing, all together as the white-blue sky fights its way to brightness.

6. ‘We got this / we’ve got you / lie down

The cars don’t stop, won’t stop, just tires and metal and the horns are going and the banner is unfurling and the cars keep moving and we are all shouting, helpless, lost. My hands are on the bonnet and in his eyes just white fury and I can’t stop it and I lift my hands and he’s gone. And there’s more. Cars and cars and cars. I never thought they would try to drive into us. G sees it and calls it.

“We got this”

what?

“We’ve got you!”

what?

“Lie down!”

And I do. I lie down, lock on, and wait. A screaming wildness in my ears, then a glorious calm. We have torn a hole in the world and in the break is not the abyss. Only the quiet and the chanting, the blue skies and my aching neck, the call, the response, the response and the call. The sirens. Here we go!

7. Is there anyone in charge I can speak to?

Is there anyone in charge I can speak to? Do you have a spokesperson? Is ANYONE in charge here?

Their familiar questions, our familiar lack of leadership. Within minutes, an arrest. The banner gone, our friends threatened, the press moved out of the way. Soon screens are erected around us, to shield the drivers in their cars from our prone bodies. We are alone now and outnumbered, our voices hoarse from shouting, the adrenaline comes and goes, sloshes through me. I’m thirsty.

I feel smaller behind the screens, no longer able to see G’s boots on the traffic island, or to catch a glimpse of a familiar journalist. The officer keeps speaking to me, trying to catch a rapport. He’s calm, controlled, polite. He offers me water and I drink less than I want, for fear of filling my bladder. He thinks I am mad. The sparks fly past my nose as they cut a metal-concrete-wire tube from my arm, a device I could release myself from in seconds. I understand why the officers roll their eyes.

But there’s a guy in a Kangol hat looking down from the grass verge over the bridge, and just cracking jokes, loving it, gassed up on the spectacle, the simplicity, the barefaced cheek of hitting pause on the world. No one is in charge here. And even the most senior officer at the scene knows it.

8. no comment

The cell is as bare and institutional as you might expect, but I feel a rush of warm gratitude at the squeaky blue mattress, and fall asleep within minutes. I wake up, my head pulsing, ask for tea and ready meals, my solicitor, painkillers. Between naps, I wonder what’s happened outside. Did it make the news? I keep falling asleep, thinking ‘I never sleep in the day.’ Maybe it’s not the day anymore. I’ve always hated not knowing the time. Finally, my solicitor arrives and a square-jawed, blue-eyed cop rattles through his questions. No comment no comment no comment no comment. I’m taken back to my cell and sit with my feet on the floor, expecting to be out in minutes. An hour or more passes before they open the door. The worst hour.

9. through the door

Walking down the corridor, I wonder how I’ll find my friends without my phone. My solicitor said they were in a hotel bar? There can’t be that many hotels nearby. I’ll find them. And then I’m through the door and there’s applause! And my friends are here (my friends are here!) and D is here (D is here!) and everyone’s like, oh my fucking days, the coverage! The press, the telly, channel 4, the BBC, sky news, CNN. You lot broke the internet. And I hear it but I don’t hear it, because my heart is full of the people that came to pick us up and we all trip out into hugs, stories, laughter, cigarettes, the warm night. And then I get my phone back and see the messages and my full heart spills over.

10. If you’re on every channel, they can’t pretend you don’t exist.

The next day I catch up on the coverage. I dive deep into the other world, our collective distortion mirror. I keep spotting my mum’s jacket (I guess now she knows I borrowed it), a flash of red in every photo. When I get past the banal heart-leap of recognition, I start to understand. I can feel the contours of an argument I’ve seen in only two dimensions. The cars must stop, the horns must blare, the officer must roll his eyes. If you’re on every channel, they can’t pretend you don’t exist. Reason torn asunder, so that someone else can speak for once.

11. A game of poker with the CPS

Months have past since that August day. This time the creaking tube journey is at rush hour. I realise I only take the tube at rush hour when there’s a situation, when the world is too much, when I’m summoned by bureaucracy or navigating a crisis.

Eleven is an unruly number, someone is always running late, and decisions are hard to make. Outside the courtroom, we sit on the floor nursing coffees. The Crown Prosecution Service send down a list of charges; we confer and send back a plea: not guilty. We do this twice. Each time, we call their bluff. A game of poker with the CPS. Finally, we settle. The game is tied, a date is set for the next round. We leave fractured. I don’t stay for a drink.

On the tube with A, we eat pineapple and post-mortem the day. We barely know each other but have quickly learnt how to read each other’s faces, how to care for each other. Even if it’s not enough, I’m grateful. We hug, part ways.

Someone said this was the action continuing. I feel the weary return of my cynicism, my sense that we are bound together by an illusion, fascinated by an image that melts at the edges.

12. And our defence is?

You can have your phone on you in the dock. So we sit there, listening intently, then listlessly texting, leaning forward to hear, then sprawling back like teenagers. There’s something innately funny about authority, it is easy to mock, even from behind the glass. But it gets boring fast, and it’s the boredom that gets you. It’s a war of attrition, a slow and churning mastication. Simple ideas chewed into a pulp. I picture paper left in the rain, turning to mulch and drying in clumps like a papier-mâché octopus. If there’s beauty in a legal argument, it’s easily lost in the low din of the courtroom. It’s not like the movies. It’s a bit like watching The Bill with the sound off.

And our defence is? Well. The answer is both simple and complex. We’re right.

I know that we are—the facts are right, the argument is right, our analysis is right—right? The prosecutor plays the footage reel over and over again, a crude montage. It’s not a lie, but it’s a paltry truth. I think about the mothers, sisters, brothers on television telling the other truth, the bigger truth. A in the witness box, speaking in a way I thought you couldn’t speak in court. She lays it down like poetry. It’s as wild as lying down in traffic. We fight madness with sanity, sanity with madness. I know we aren’t wrong. That much I know.

13. Does conviction include doubt?

I push back against the boredom and try to tune in. I think about the double meaning of conviction in this courtroom. Sincere belief. Condemnation. Does conviction include doubt?

Every day we have been here has been crisp and gorgeous, all misty sunrises and days dying in pink-streaked glory. It makes doubt feel okay.

14.The fields are a frosty English watercolour

I get on the wrong train, and end up in the countryside forty minutes before the judge is giving the verdict. The fields are a frosty English watercolour, but in a watercolour I wouldn’t care, and I wish I could just look at them. I run across the platform to catch the train back to London and get to court sheepish and exhilarated.

The judge (who has a cold) splutters his way through an elaboration of his job, a recap of the evidence and—the important part—our guilt. No one is surprised or especially disappointed. We rattle through the formalities and make our way to the pub. A pint before midday. It feels like the wake of someone I always liked but didn’t know well. We unwind and then unravel from each other, make our own ways home.

Nathaniel Heely’s earliest written work took the form of song lyrics. He even had aspirations of being in a band with his childhood friend, Sean. Too many of these songs were influenced by the ‘90s boy band NSYNC, and critics and scholars have agreed that it is best they never saw the light of day.

“You Are All Strangers and I Hope You Find Your Way to Heaven” will appear in Nathaniel Heely’s debut collection Poems from Darfur (Scribner, 2017). He lives abroad.

Nathaniel Heely questions daily the Church and Religion in which he was raised, though he still loves God.

Nathaniel Heely is the author of this book. This one that you are reading. Except this is the About the Author note, and technically this is not part of the fiction except in the case that Nathaniel Heely is fictional to his readers. That is, what can his readers say factually, actually, truthfully, knowingly, vividly about his entity? What do they know about him not presented within this volume, his first novel?

More than once, Nathaniel Heely has misread “pet peeve” as “pet perve.”

Nathaniel Heely’s work has been translated into seven different languages: French, Latin, Spanish, German, Ithkuil, Koine Greek and Russian. His newest work, N’Importequi, is a book-length reportage exploring the lives of vandals, pranksters, street thieves and graffiti artists and will be available worldwide May 2018.

Nathaniel Heely believes he has smoked his last cigarette.

Nathaniel Heely is unsure whether he can call himself a writer. He feels the compulsion to affix “aspiring” to this label.

If he could do it all over again, Nathaniel Heely would not once regret watching a single rerun.

Nathaniel Heely wonders what Jesus Christ’s author bio would have looked like. Would Jesus have boasted of his carpentry career? Would he attempt to deliver a fifty-word gospel? Was Jesus even literate?

Nathaniel Heely’s hobbies include basketball, watching cartoons, staring contests with the open fridge and wrestling with his dog.

No, Nathaniel Heely has never owned a pair of Heelys. His feet grew too quickly for that kind of investment.

Some of Nathaniel Heely’s earliest fiction involved him being a Jedi.

Nathaniel Heely would like to paraphrase JK Rowling paraphrasing Graham Greene: “My faith is that my faith will return.”

Nathaniel Washington Heely was born at the height of the American Empire in the 1990s. He authored the epic America trilogy: “The Bombing,” “The Fall” and “Exile” and is considered to be one of the most valuable voices of later antiquity.

Nathaniel Heely was recently published by The New Yorker. The previous sentence is false.

Nathaniel Heely spends much of his free time writing. A large portion of this writing has never been written.

Nathaniel Heely is a sentence composer. He experiments with silence and blankness, though with the occasional blot and scribble.

Nathaniel Heely was drafted by the Dallas Mavericks in the 2nd round of the 2010 NBA draft. He came to prominence in his rookie year when he won Finals co-MVP and was voted to the NBA All-Rookie team. He currently plays for Panathinaikos B.C. in Athens and in the off-season is a regular guest of the Ben & Skin show on 105.3 The Fan.

Nathaniel Heely’s mother likes and follows his blog.

For more information on this author visit nathanielheely.com.

Before his death in 2012, Nathaniel Heely produced a voluminous daily journal on his computer desktop titled “In Case of Amnesia.” The book is excerpted in part here and will be sampled in many literary magazines before its official release, slated for some time in early 2017.

Nathaniel Heely does not understand the need to speak in the third person. Suppose he called himself I? I live and write in Dallas. Well, a suburb, technically. Sometimes I write in Dallas city limits. Is this any cleaner? Clearer?

In all likelihood this byline is being skipped over. Regardless, a healthy judgment has likely already passed on its author, and the name and previous publications would do nothing that a cursory Google search couldn’t.

I am a jester in the King’s Court.

Nathaniel Heely reads, writes and publishes whatever he can get away with in Dallas—a suburb of Dallas—in Richardson.

Nathaniel Heely has always wished he could run faster. If he had, perhaps he would have remained quarterback sophomore year. He more or less grew into his body but still gets grief for his elongated stride. As a result he has developed a defense mechanism in which he insults his speed first, thereby giving others license to laugh at him.

At the age of 18 Nathaniel Heely was awarded a prize named after William Blake. To that point in his life he had only a bare familiarity with William Blake’s work, afforded by his private school education. For the large part of his life he has ignored literature outside the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, excepting that which is assigned to him within the classroom.

Nathaniel Heely is one of the founders of the Metamodernism cultural movement and is considered a scholar in the future’s cultural direction. He briefly participated in an act of Yellowism with Vladimir Umanets, until the latter’s arrest in 2012.

I am Siva the God of Death.

Nathaniel Heely is a conglomeration of voices that have merged into a refined, cooperative strategic agency. On their own, many of the minor voices were unprofitable, but in its twenty-four years of existence, the agency has transformed the industry as it looks to establish permanent ties in the business, financial, homemaking and educational sectors.

I am aspiring, in pursuit of…

Nathaniel Heely’s work is heavily influenced by a falsification of Woody Allen paraphrasing Groucho Marx paraphrasing Sigmund Freud: “I would never go to a session with a psychiatrist that would have me as a patient.”

I am that I am that I am, therefore I think, write, in Dallas—a suburb of Dallas—in Richardson.

Nathaniel Heely admires silence in individuals. He prefers Thomas Pynchon’s interview form to any others and wishes he had a bit of recluse in him. A recluse is like a monk, devoted to nothing but his doings. Yes, perhaps monks care about how they come across to other monks, but that is the extent of their vanity. The world is not supposed to understand them.

I am that Eye see—which is all but the eye of I.

Nathaniel Heely is most famous for his aphorism, “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.”

Nathaniel Heely is not a poet; rather, he is a trapeze artist, though admittedly not very good, as audiences and hospital bills worldwide will attest.

Nathaniel Heely died in May 2015 on his twenty-fourth birthday having published no books, no novels, producing nothing of merit in the Western literary canon, having never won the Nobel Prize—for Literature, Peace, or otherwise—and having abandoned his father’s last name.

We’ll be at the Casanova Lounge on Oct. 14 from 5-6. Apparently they have sexy paintings everywhere. So stop by, grab a drink, say hi, and wander the dozens of other cool literary happenings in the Mission District from 5-9 that evening. It may help to view a map of the events.

I am in the middle of the road. At a crossroad actually. At my back is a speeding Volkswagen and in my front comes a biker overtaking a Hilux van. People are running across the road — too busy with vehicles that one doesn’t look out for Zebra crossing. Does this place need a traffic light? Are you thinking that? Don’t think that.

I am in the middle of the road but I suddenly stop running across to the other side of the road. Something is not holding me from running. Something is not dragging me — something — someone in my head says stop. I begin to retrace my steps to face my back and enjoy the scene of the speeding Volkswagen. I smile. My hands in my pockets.

Someone drags me by the hand. Someone drags me out screaming. Are you mad? Tell, don’t you fancy your life? What could you have been thinking? Death. No. I wasn’t thinking of death. I was exploring my freedom. Is standing in the middle of the road waiting for a vehicle to hit one down not one of their rights? I never thought of death. Why did you think that?

*

A man on the bus with me from Abakaliki to Onitsha says that this country is shit. A hearse. A corpse. Death. A noose. A hangman — an executioner and an open grave. He says he wishes to be from Mars. He wishes to be gone and far gone from this country. He screams. Perhaps, he doesn’t know I am shaken now. He spits fire. His fire is raging. His rage a dark cloud — sign of a rainfall. A rain all over me — smelling. Who doesn’t know that much of talk causes an influx of raining saliva? The rain is falling and I am shaking.

*

History is a subject in school that I never took, but I read history books. I read history with one eye closed and the other open. My legs crossed and my mind jumping like a man doing a horse’s dance. Look at that, are these people dumb? Why did that happen? Could you have allowed the junta to crush your mother while still giving birth to you? Doesn’t make sense. Who thinks that? I am not writing about my country. I can’t. It takes people with hearts like a stone to write the story of such a country as this without freezing. It takes people with such heart to freeze and be unfrozen. I can’t think of that.

*

We have got some leaders of some fantastically corrupt countries coming to Britain — Nigeria and Afghanistan — possibly the two most corrupt countries in the world. David Cameron, former prime minister of United Kingdom, was caught on footage chatting with the queen at the Buckingham Palace. Queen Elizabeth was listening with sheer interest and David laughed like someone at their first prom. Vanguard Nigeria took to figures to reveal why David made the comment.

Afghanistan was ranked 167, ahead of only Somalia and North Korea, in Transparency International’s 2015 corruption perception index. Nigeria was at 136.

Nigerians reacted. My Twitter handle caught fire. And the fire became a smoke and the smoke turned to another fire. Nigerians are waiting for the President to react.

The Prime Minister must be looking at an old snapshot of Nigeria. Things are changing. That, we believe…

President Buhari said.1 Some Nigerians clapped because they believe he is the saviour, the redeemer and the reformer. Nigerians believe in him and just like the symbol of liberty, the president is the symbol of war against indiscipline.2 But I can’t talk about my country. I am talking about Nigeria — I am talking about the world — how to de-map a country. This is an art — an art allures. It uses the story of one to tell a whole, but who, what, where else is fantastically corrupt?

*

Someone drags me to a safe place and starts talking to me about hope. He says that nothing on earth should make one think of taking his life. You have no right to kill yourself. He says and I smile. He frowns. I stop smiling. A tear. I am tearing apart inside. A tear. A tear rolling down my right cheek. But while I was on the road, I never thought of death — suicide. I thought of living. Surviving. But someone in my head said to stop and enjoy art — stop, appreciate art — can’t you see the beauty of that Volkswagen? The speed, almost ghostly. Almost like the wind. Can you see that? The voice said. I only wanted to take a look before the hand dragged me out forcefully. Is it not one’s right to appreciate?

*

I like reading history books but when I get to a place that has the map of a country — Nigeria on it, I stop, take a deep breath, pull a razor, and started learning how to cut. How to cut without tearing — cut without bleeding — without feeling pains. Without spoiling the entire text. Am I cutting myself? Does the country hurt much? Why are you crying?

The man on the keke-napep3 says I look like someone he knows, perhaps, he has seen my twin somewhere — I have no twin and the person I look like is an elderly man who is from my village because I just finished answering a call in my dialect. The man you look like is my very good friend. We fought in the war. I remember how we stole things from people’s farms to eat when hunger struck we the Biafrans. You look like him. True. You speak like him. I want to punch him real hard in his face to shut his running mouth. I want to scream at the top of my voice for him to stop. Am I hurting? Is history hurting? Why the tear? Are you tearing?! A tear. Another tear rolling down my left cheek but he keeps talking.

I have a headache.

*

Nigeria is broke, pure and simple. Lai Mohammed4 — minister of Information and Culture said, and the World heard it. They watched him drag his sagging mouth around the x-axis looking for y that was no place near. Lawd?! Did we hear that? His eyeglasses that have the exact shape of binoculars, loose on his nose and his hands trying to drive home his point: all point at something in the background. Recession? But we have got enough loot recovered from previous administration. He talked. The world heard and we giggled.

*

I run my hands on the map of my/our/your country and it pricks me. Where does it hurt? I let out a cry. After a wry. A why. A cry and a why together.

Prices of things in the market have changed overtime. The naira wakes everyday to depreciate against the dollar and itself. Naira is a currency. It is no longer a hope—giving currency. [Naira] is no currency — argues a buyer in the market trying to buy denim jeans. He looks at the jean properly as if there is a hole somewhere hiding — waiting for the buyer to buy and leave and then expose itself at home. But I got this same quality two thousand five last year. The buyer says, this time facing me. I nod. We nod and he says, you see what this country is turning into. I am not smiling — wondering whether what he said is a question or a remark. Does he need an answer? Is he expecting an answer? Why is my mouth not moving? He pays three thousand four hundred naira after much begging and leaves talking to himself. He keeps talking. He is shouting. Is he mad? Are we not going mad?

At which point does water on fire reach before it becomes hot — before it becomes boiled water? About dot com answers:

The boiling point of water is 100°C or 212° F at 1 atmosphere of pressure (sea level).

However, the value is not a constant. The boiling point of water depends on the atmospheric pressure, which changes according to elevation. The boiling point of water is 100°C or 212° F at 1 atmosphere of pressure (sea level), but water boils at a lower temperature as you gain altitude (e.g., on a mountain) and boils at a higher temperature if you increase atmospheric pressure (lived below sea level).

Another factor that can facilitate water to boil faster or slower is dirt. The map of the country in my history book is not on the mountain. It is close to an ocean and the Sahara desert. So, the temperature is beyond sea level and desert level — the heat is strong. The heat is wind. The wind is a killer maniac, thus, the country in my history book has reached its boiling point and the president comes to give the people hope. He comes to still the water. He has the right word to say. He always has: You have the past administration to blame for your woes. You don’t blame me. I am only restructuring. He blames.

The Map in the pages of my history book bleeds. Cries out in pain. Did they say corruption? Corruption. We are fighting it fantastically — this is always or close to the headlines.

God is crucified today. He’s got a lot of petitions — sickening, all. Lai Mohammed, being the perfect man he is for all situations, comes to save God.

Well, I can tell you today that corruption is already fighting back, and it is fighting hard and dirty. He says and I forget where I was before the razor started cutting me. Does it hurt?

*

I am given a butt-kick to go home and never think of killing myself. I should always tell God my problems. He is all-solving — he sure has an answer to what you are thinking; the hand that dragged me out from the road quips. I shake my head and start walking to the bus stop where I would get a bus back to school.

God, are you there? Are you listening?

Silence. Silence.

No sound. No whirlwind. No chariots running down from heaven. No angels whispering. No Mary calling me son. No Elders singing hymns to calm my nerves. Heaven seems to be too far to hear or feel or hear these.

Hey God, are you there?

*

The woman I am just meeting for the first time asks me the naira equivalent of dollar.

Four hundred and seventy five naira. I say.

Four what?

Four seven five.

Hmm. God will save us.

She knows what I want to ask. Like most people of her age, she has become one with the spirit world — she can see and hear things others can’t hear or see.

My son needs to be operated on. He’s got a tumour and the Teaching Hospital says we need to travel to either Germany or India for the surgery to be successful.

God is crucified today. Is there not much in his hands already? Who calls, who believes, who hopes?

Hey, God, are you there?

*

All is well. All will be alright. Change comes so slow, but God has either gone on vacation or he has been crucified.

But then, in the Bible, God warns us to be mindful of those that preach change5 —Proverbs 24:21—22: My son, [reverently] fear the lord and the king and do not associate with those who are given to change [of allegiance, and are revolutionary],

For their calamity shall rise suddenly, and who knows the punishment and ruin which both [the Lord and the king] will bring upon?

Hey, God, are you there?

The man at Yaba, Lagos state tries crucifying God with his demands. His demands are containers containing other containers. His demands are a mountain and it is an obstacle that blinds…

Hey, God, are you there?

The man at Yaba jumps off from that tall building — is it a mall? How did he get there? Can you see his head shattered on the ground? Oh my, did you see his green blood and that whitish sorta thing? Did you — did you?

God, no. Wait. Are you there?

You’ve already seen the body of the student at University of Nigeria Nsukka dangling from his roof. God, they say he is in his final year of study but owes a lot of money he may not be able to pay even after getting a job. A job? He’s not certain of getting one. People before him are not yet working. How dare he dream of getting a work? God, wait. Did you hear that? They said it.

God, remember that woman who drank insecticide because her purse is the same thing as void and her creditors are already piling up to collect what she has left of life. You remember? They say it’s insanity. How does one think of that? Kill yourself? Fuck it. Where there is life, hope survives. They said it, but God you know this ain’t true. It is another lie to keep us all to continue suffering — accepting all that is given to us.

God is crucified today. No, wait. God, don’t die yet.

Two women in the month of October, 2016, traded their children for food in the market. They said hunger is a pretty looking bottomless pit that caught their attention that they never knew when they fell in. And they were dying. So, they sold. Wait, God, listen. Did you know what people say?

God, are you there?

A man in my village just jumped into a flooded river to run away from the mob chasing him for stealing some food in the market. We’ve not seen him, perhaps; he is now one with the river.

There is a rumour of a seven year old boy burnt to death in Ibadan or Lagos for stealing a cup of garri. How do you want to shout? Which do you shout first — burnt, or seven?

God please, don’t go yet. Don’t die yet. No vacation yet. Who do we believe in for our survival?

*

The president is talking, pal, look at his clean glimmering shaven face. Don’t you like his kaftan? He wears it better. He said he has got an ear problem and travelled to UK to go treat himself — that best hospital there — fine hospital with fine services. Now, he’s back. Back for real. He says he understands our/your/my plight – he reads the dailies and sympathises with us. But know, people — your problems are what the passed administration caused — how can I ever stop blaming them?

Blame them too.

*

I am not writing about my country. I am writing my story — myself — tearing. It takes a heart strong as a stone to bleed out words about a shattering/battered nation without getting drowned in depression and death. So, I am writing me — I am drawing a map — I am tearing a map — I am de-mapping.

I have a headache.

*

I am in the class staring at the map in my history book and wonder what sort of people do not learn from history. How do you tell your children that the competent man that took office in the ’90s through the barrel of gun can rule you democratically and with sympathy? The prince is too righteous to feel what you feel as far as it doesn’t make him bow. Machiavelli was right when he wrote that a hungry poor people cannot revolt. Nigeria is broke. Mohammed’s voice echoes.

My history book starts with how the country was brought together and how the people struggled for independence and how the nationalists became leaders and how they became corrupt and the junta came to save the country and how the country started tearing apart — ethnic tensions and how the war started and how Gowon said there was neither a Victor nor a Loser and how he made the supposedly losers humble by making their currency equals to nothing in naira and how the people started believing and living and how another junta came and suspended the constitution and became a tyrant and looted and later died for this democracy we enjoy now to come to us.

My history book starts with profiles. Each leader. Each figure. Each hero. Each villain. All. A profile.

How do you write about something — someone?

*

Solomon Dalong is the sports minister of Nigeria. He represents everything sports. He talks sports but if I were to be his biographer — I will do nothing but wonders — he deserves a stone from posterity, at least. You think?

I can start by saying that Solomon Dalong is an honourable honest man sent from heaven to save man — the eclipsing sports ministry. He is a man that understands all the country needs. He is just like the Prince — his master. He has no clue as to why he is what he is. And why is he even there?! He has a different speciality but the Prince still gave him a post — a post bigger than the man and the man reasons using his mouth — only an honourable man reasons thus. He wakes from slumber after some dailies displayed pictures of him and the family on vacation —swimming — it calms his nerves — his nerves are now cold. He wakes to resound what his colleague said in other news.

Nigeria is poor to spend money on sports; he says. And when the Falconets won the cup, he comes out to say, We can’t pay you, we didn’t know you’d win. An honest man. A laudable attitude — such sincerity.

The prince in the wake of the outburst — no, before the outburst said, I can’t stop blaming the past administration; they’re the reason we suffer now. He accused and blamed again. Perhaps, the past administration went with our brains — sense of reasoning and opening mouth. Perchance, the past administration gathered all the never right—thinking personalities and gave them the portfolios never suiting where they belong, and yet I don’t want to write about this, I see myself tearing out pages of the history book where our/my/your map is.

*

I am in my house at school. I have nothing to eat. I call home. Mama tells me that she has not been paid for long now. She has nothing to send me. She just borrowed some money from a neighbour who needs the cash soon to go to hospital. My stomach hurts. I go back to lie in bed. The voice comes whispering to me — cry, cry, don’t stop crying — explode. Cuss. Say the world is cruel. Fuck the world. Screw it. Never stop fucking the world. Life is now tiresome. Go to the kitchen, get a knife and stab yourself. Die.

See blood. Die. Die.

I have got a headache.

*

God is crucified today. I start mapping out the dots that connect depression, pain, and frustration and a country. How does it hurt? How does it feel?

Are you a country?

Are we countrymen?

Countryman, wait. Stay longer.

Remember that time of the year when Britain carried out a referendum — Brexit,6 they said. We sat comfortably here flipping through history books trying to locate their map and know how to cut it out. Remember? We didn’t, but their leaders gambled real time — real hard. It was funny how a country wanted to cut itself to bits because it wants to reclaim and you wonder what? Britain is a well-known colonialist. And doesn’t it feel good watching your former imperial masters burning — cutting throats and falling apart? Doesn’t it feel right watching Nigel7 nurse his ambitions while Cameron fell apart? We wished more happened.

I am reading the history of the world — I am not writing about Britain, not Nigeria, not Russia,8 not Aleppo9 — Syria, not Israel.10 I am reading what it takes to be an American but doesn’t it cost nothing — watching the self-proclaimed superpower tear itself out from history?

This people are bleeding but they never learn from history — same mistakes. Donald tells his countrymen to come together and make America great again.11 And one wonders if America was ever great with all its dirty past, racism, microaggressions, crime against humanity. How do I tear this map — these maps? How do you tear yourself without bleeding? Am I bleeding? This place bleeds. It hurts.

[After the election of Donald Trump, a theory surfaced that Russia helped Trump win the election — Russian hackers rigged US of A elections? We asked and we blamed.]

The Map is torn.

Countryman, are you wary yet?

God. No. Don’t die now.

Hey God, are you there? Everyone is looking for whom to blame, perhaps, I blame you for all these — your silence. No, I don’t blame you but the voice in my head does, and you telling me to blame the people that never learn from history; means what?

1 Buhari who was sworn in as Nigeria’s president on the 29th of May, 2015 is a metaphor for cluelessness. He is also well versed in saying what he doesn’t mean. His messiahic stands took Nigeria down the drain in 1984 when he was the military head of state. But people believe in him. Is he not righteous? Are we not fighting corruption?

2 War Against Indiscipline was introduced in the years Buhari served as a military head of state. This war is a failed policy with no goals actually. But, is he not righteous? Are we not fighting corruption?

3 A tricycle with a space at the back for three passengers and the driver built—front—seat. A new place for gossip – everyone has something to say, by the way. You are never a stranger on a keke.

4 Mohammed is a character. He trained as a lawyer and he is known for generally making things look better when they are bad. Euphemism, right? Mohammed is among the persons brought into power to foster the president’s vision of cluelessness. None on the list of Buhari’s cabinet has a record for being a prince. Not Niccolo Machiavelli kind of a heartless prince. But even Nic’s Prince understands that you lose power when you lose the support of the local people.

5 APC – Buhari’s political party’s slogan or motto is change.

6 So now, Britain voted to leave Europe. They want to gain back what got lost. They want to regain their lands. Fucking immigrants. Fucking refugees. Britain is a house on fire.

7 Nigel Farage, patriotic countryman, arise.

8 America’s torn in the flesh country — Putin’s footstall.

9 21st Century city in flames — city of burning men — Victims of Assad’s wrath. Victims of Putin tests.

10 God’s people, fighting to exist — ever ready to attack — how do you spell peace within God’s walls?

11 And America has become great again with the same hate and aggressive behaviours against the people of colour and the Mexicans. Hate so strong that Muslims still wonder what their fates are. Great again – people are now molested and harassed in his name and under his umbrella. Great. We are clapping. Great. How do you kill a dog? Give it a name.